“Dear Creator, Help me let go of everything I think I am, to make room for everything I really am.” This is a Facebook post this morning from a local poet (Taos, NM), Lyla June Johnson, who is a very gifted soul and is a passionate spokeswoman for Native American issues, spirituality, and social activism. This woman “gets it” and does so much more quickly than I started the process of “getting it.” Here she puts on the table a core issue that I’m wrestling with in my life, “we are not what we think.” This is part of what leads me to use the bumper sticker wisdom so often, “Don’t believe everything you think,” realizing that beliefs are merely thoughts and are readily seductive with self-serving whims of the ego. Sure, welcome the thoughts that flow into and through our mind but occasionally take pause, mull them over, and we might learn that these “beliefs” could be a bit less certain than our ego wanted them to be.
Without realizing the limitations of believing in our rational formulations, Truth which is an elusive process and not an accumulation of factual knowledge can lead us into folly. Novelist Hermann Hesse noted this when he wrote, “My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” We will inevitably be guilty of this “dishonesty” if we can’t practice the self-reflection, i.e “meta-cognition” noted here for the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, “Reflection requires that the plain opposition of positive and negative be left behind. Thinking is not content with the abstraction of mutual exclusivities, but struggles to conceive of a structured wholeness nuanced enough to contain what appeared to be contradictories.” We must learn to occasionally find the capacity to, “think about our thinking.”
literary lew 
For decades, I’ve found comfort in this definition of the Hegelian dialectic: “The process of change in which a concept or its realization passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite.” We are, and are not, what we think.
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This is all very freeing….I have not liked myself because of what I have thought….
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Makes sense. Eastern teaching is that thought is not self but independent entity which must be dealt with caution, selectively.
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We spent time at St. Peters Abbey over New Years. The Abbots homily was simple but powerful if you were listening. He said a lady with a cart filled with groceries went to the line up that said 6 items only. The person behind her was fuming. The cashier said to the lady with the filled cart, which six items would you like to keep and pay for. So the lesson was which things do you want to fill your cart with and what do you want to leave behind in this New Year. The Abbot offered that we fill our cart with peace, gratitude, joy, kindness and then he said he left the other two up to us to ponder what we would put in the cart. I added three more…do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. I am thinking if I do these I can eliminate joy from the first four because it will naturally follow through if I work at all the others. I will have six items I can keep and “pay for”.
Wishing you a safe and peaceful New Year even though chaos seems to be on the rise. My granddaughter writes an important exam tomorrow.she is ten..and these exams if done well will enable her to get into a private skill in London England. I will be praying for her.
That’s is what I am focusing on for her sake.
Bonnie from Canada
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